In putting this website together I am strongly moved to acknowledge and thank all the people who have profoundly influenced my journey towards professional mastery as well as my personal health and wholeness. They are my "Ancestors", "Lineage Holders" and "Lineage Mothers and Fathers". Through their courage to persevere in developing their systems or become solid conduits for their lineages, I have benefited tremendously and without them, I would not be where I am today. After 30 years of learning, I have realized that there is a set of underlying principles common to everything that I have chosen to learn, and that every teacher I've trained with has been teaching me the same thing – just from different perspectives.

I have tried my best to articulate heartfelt gratitude for all the unique lessons I have learned from each of my teachers. And hope I have done it in a way that best conveys what I value most about each of them with the respect and value with which I hold them in my heart.

Peter Levine PHD : Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing) provided one of the first learning environments I participated in along my path towards professional growth and personal healing. He has been a seminal pioneer in the development of shock and trauma resolution therapies. And, his concepts laid strong and powerful foundational perspectives in my work with shock and trauma. Since then I have studied with other gifted people who have held their own unique keys to working in this field, and it is with great appreciation of Peter's initial influence, that over time, I have evolved my own unique style and synthesis. I feel blessed to have worked with Peter and his system during my most formative years. The essential components of the foundation he laid for working with particular kinds of overwhelming life experiences through verbal and sensation tracking, as well as through touch and bodywork via Kathy Kain (representing the bodywork component of Somatic Experiencing), have been of inestimable value. I find myself returning over and over again to the core teachings of his system and appreciate the influence that these teachings have had on almost all the systems I've studied after his. I deeply appreciate his vision and perseverance to bring his perspective and body of information out into the world.

Risa Kaparo PHD, Minister: I studied with Risa for seven years. Through Risa I came to understand that who I am essentially would be enough to guide me in all my deep listening processes. That it wasn't about how many systems I learned, but more about being in my authentic self, and learning to trust that. And, if I attended deeply enough to my own rhythms and responses, as well as resting and opening myself into nonlocal states of consciousness, everything that I needed to take up in myself and someone else would be accessible to me. Her unique blend of David Bohm/Krishnamurthy style dialogue, cranial sacral/bodywork and Vanda yoga has been without parallel anywhere else in my life. The unique intersection that she occupies blends all of her teachings in ways - that everything studied is eventually seen as the same thing in different forms. Different gateways or portals into the same states of consciousness. Without her ministrations I would not have learned about pathways into nondual states of awareness, restoration of physical functioning in very unique ways , and a capacity for original thought that I so deeply craved. The skills that I learned with her comprise some of the most foundational aspects of consciousness that I hold. With her I learned my first steps towards owning my inner authority, at the same time as suspending being a knower and still fully engaging with my life and with others.

Kathy Kain: Kathy I have studied with, off and on, for years. She has always impressed me with her ability to teach clearly and simply complex concepts (including Cranial Sacral) and to do it in a way that is balanced, engaging and often quite humorous. Of the many things I learned from her, built on previous skills, i deepened my access to release shock and trauma through touch and movement. I learned how to sequence healing, release blockages gently through different physiological structures/neural pathways and to understand and speak the specific languages of structure throughout the body. These skills repeatedly reestablish health and cooperation between structures at an organism level and each skill continues to prove to be a doorway into very profound work - in a very gentle non invasive attention-based format.

Lisbet Marcher, Eric Jarlnaes Marianna Benson, Peter Bernhardt, Anne and Joel Isaacs, Theresa Beldon, Barbara Renshaw, Joel Wade and the rest of the Bodynamic crew:Bodynamics proved to be the ultimate system for me. Within this very broad, deeply sophisticated and well researched body based developmental psychosomalogical system, I found an application for everything that I have ever trained in. In the nearly 30 years that I have been trained and been training others I have never lost my respect and wonder for its depth and precision. I deeply appreciate that, unlike other systems, its knowledge-base was developed by a core group of people, not just one. Its contribution to somatic psychology by correlating muscle function and psychological meaning is without equal............

Merete Brantbjerg: Merete is a colleague, a mentor and a friend. Knowing her has been a joy and I feel blessed and grateful to have traveled with her starting at the beginning of my postgraduate work. One of the original cofounders of the Bodynamic system she has evolved her own work, Moaiku, which is a very rich system based in large part on working with the hypo function, or deeply given up parts of our defense strategies. Most systems work with the over energy parts and the breaking down of defenses. She has focused and developed some brilliant resources for working with the parts of our psychology and physiology that either give up, resign or freeze. Gentle, less is more, resource oriented skill building. No one else in the world is working with these concepts or at this level that I know of. Her level of integrity, precision, follow through and accountability has been remarkable and unique in my experience. The way her mind thinks and her capacity to translate that into word and experience, broken down into step-by-step learning is exquisite. Her work has also influenced the evolution of my own work and has allowed me to continue to refine and deepen the precision of how I listen, and the importance of pauses, stillness and space. She has been both a source of academic and artistic inspiration and a testament to working with someone who is committed to the work both personally and professionally. To work with someone who is as committed to personal integrity as well as professional integrity is rare and has been most welcome.

Dr. Daniel Allen DO:Daniel has been a great mentor and colleague. A big powerful but gentle teddy bear of a man, trained by Jim Jealous, his approach to osteopathic craniosacral work took me beyond all previous training in structure and technique. His teachings deepened me fully into the holistic energetics and sacred geometry that is life force flowing through structure and being. He oriented me in new ways that expanded my sense of the embryological underpinnings of fluid and structural flow as well as the rhythms of cellular, structural and biofield functioning. I honed my skills in tracking healthy vital life force frequencies.

Larhken Carroll: My journey into Brain Gym started with a very close friend of mine. It was through her that I met Larhken. Larhken's love for finding the line between scientific knowledge, intuitive alchemy and intellectual precision has been an exquisite playground for me. She leaves no stones unturned and researches things down to their most basic components. Her knowledge base is vast. And she is very generous with it, loving to share passionately her resources, in any teaching situation or collegial exchange. And as one of the family of original contributors to the development of the Brain Gym system she carries the history, evolution and growing edge of the system as well as many other system resources. Both as mentor and friend she has been a delight to know and exchange information with. The year and a half that I spent with her as a mentor really deepened a lot of basic principles that have continued to serve me profoundly over the years. And our affiliation continues to be rich and satisfying.

Julie Henderson: Julie is unique in many ways. Soft-spoken and penetrating she is the first person that I know of who has fused Tibetan Buddhist practices with somatic psychology. Her system, Zapchen, has some of the most lovely people in it, who sit together as a Sangha and deepen into and refine the marriage between spirit and matter, spiritual teachings and body sensing, unfolding these practices fully into the non-dual and unified field. To participate in a spiritual practice that is so deeply body-based and also recognizes the importance of mutual connection is incredibly nurturing. It has been from sitting in her five-day retreats that i have gained the deepest visceral understanding of the importance of doing small profound pieces of work and then napping with or in the presence of another safe human being to deeply integrate new learning into body. Julie's constantly evolving quest for integrated and embodied connection with her teachers and her selflessness to serve as a conduit to bring those teachings to her Sangha has been powerful and profound for me.

Valerie Goulding: A lot of what I've learned from Valerie has been more indirect but equally profound. After period in my life, where many piller people died in a short period of time including my mother and my mate, she picked me up, in a deeply fatigued and worn-out state, and started the process of Ayruvedic therapies that continued for over a year on a weekly basis. Through this process of renewal and rebirth, I came to understand the essential value of this well over 4000-year-old system. As a friend and colleague, she was very generous with information for my own personal understanding as well as how other people are organized and what their needs are. Out of this grew a recognition of the power of team treating clients since our two systems are so fundamentally complementary. My ability to affiliate so seamlessly with her has a lot to do with her generosity and profound skill level as a Ayruvedic practitioner, combined with our mutual understanding around how to affect profound change over a period of time in people's health and well-being. I will forever be grateful for her ministrations. Without them I would most likely not be here to be writing this page, given how depleted my system was.

Maha Vajra: Maha! What an exceptional human being and crazy wisdom teacher. Except, that he's eminently sane. A kind of sanity that traditional culture doesn't tolerate well. A man of great heart and lightning force his learning environment is the Warrior's Way. Based in esoteric martial arts, and through the blending of multidenominational mystic alchemical practices, he creates a space for the dissolution of the ego. He has an incredible gift for unbinding your attachments to anything. Even though I am still engaged in the formative stages of traveling with him it is clear that he will leave no stone unturned. All the ways in which we anchor ourselves to a sense of self, a shape, a way of being, a position, a stand..... Over time he will call each of those out and help you dissolve your need or desire to be "anything" so that you can be everything. Abiding Presence. Deeply grounded in the field of unconditional love this path is profoundly challenging and grace filled. My warrior woman has been well met here. His teachings longed for and most welcome. And the part of me that enjoys going into rich, diverse and intense fields for major transformation has found a home here. A place where I can continue to strip myself of my role personas until there's nothing left but presence. I am deeply indebted to the consistency in which field holds me as I continue my evolution regardless of whether I have the opportunity to sit with him or not.

Don Umberto and Dona Bernadina: Don Humberto and Dona Bernadina are master weavers of light. Sitting with and opening myself to the transmissions of these two wisdom beings has been one of the most profound and important traditions that I have trained in in the last 35 years. An oral tradition, this path values direct learning, knowledge, and transmission... Not book learning in principle, only direct practice and experience. They come from a high Andean mystical tradition that has an un-conquested and unassimilated cultural lineage that is over 26,000 years old, only coming out of the mountains into contact with "Western" civilization in the 1950s. Having much in common with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, it is generally believed that the spiritual heart of the planet has moved from Tibet and the Himalayas into the Andean mountain range. It would be impossible for me to put words to my experience of sitting with these two beings. What I can say is that my life has irrevocably and profoundly changed since having met them and having embraced and deepened into their tradition. In yet another way, I have come home. With a deep understanding of alchemy and "Third Force" concepts, a multidimensional cosmological view of reciprocity, unconditional love, all-encompassing interconnectedness, and a profound kindness, I know no other field as embodied, simple and clear as this. For me this is the quintessential expression of being and not doing.

Betsy Steil: To Betsy I owe undying gratitude for multitude of things that she has shared with me as a friend, a mentor and teacher. As a facilitator and ambassador for Brain Gym, Maha and the Quero, as well as other systems, she is the embodiment of where I would like my version of the synthesis of all these paths to be. As my elder, she has both presenced and provoked, nurtured and pushed, invited and declined, been silent and outspoken, embodied harmonization through complementarity and steadfastly refused to be pigeonholed, confined or labeled in any way. She teaches without teaching. And deeply respects each individuals need to learn from direct learning. Her coyote consciousness is constantly focused on her leading edge of personal evolution and her steadfast commitment to impeccability, accountability and follow through has evoked a level of trust that no one else holds in my life. Her ability to track what is unseen and unspoken and her sense of right action in those realms, leaves me with clarity of who I would wish at my bedside to make decisions for me were I not able to make them for myself.

I also want to acknowledge unnamed "teachers" that have provided me with extremely difficult "learning environments". Not because they set out to teach me in the traditional sense, but ended up providing me with the opportunity to get bigger than the circumstances and hardships that were set before us, finding my way to forgiveness and compassion…. Having learned the lessons Creator wanted me to learn along the way. Since I believe I have chosen my life – I view my life, not through the eyes of being victim to people or circumstances, but as specific lessons I signed up for before I incarnated. These lessons, even given their extremity, are some of the lessons that I value most deeply since they have provided me a way to transcend my circumstances and include the people who brought me these hard lessons as gifts in my life.